I turned 65 last year, and each year I get more and more interested in human health. For most people it happens around age 50, but I've always been a slow learner. It's critical in terms of the cost of health care.

I've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.

In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.

If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.

The sudden ending of a White House career all seems so unceremonious for aides who have personally sacrificed a lot - and sometimes even bent their conscience - to do the president's bidding.

I remember my agent at ICM at the beginning of my career telling me that I wasn't pretty enough, that I was always going to be a quirky sidekick. And he was an ogre of a man. He should have been carrying a torch. If he was in a bar, he couldn't have come near me, and then he was deciding my fate.

I have not tried for a career that's showy. I have always tried to layer things in and not push it. I love an underperformance, where you're so entrenched in who that person is that you're living in it.

This is in the plan which I have for my career and my life, to one day win the Champions League and the World Cup.